Friday, May 27, 2016

Red wolf population crashing, emergency petition filed by CBD

May 25, 2016

Wolf Conservation Center (You Tube)

BREAKING: After the US Fish and Wildlife Service abandoned its mandate to restore the critically low wild red wolf
population, numbers plummeted from around 120 two years ago to 45 or
less, making the red wolf one of the most critically imperiled species
on the planet.

On May 24, The Center for Biological Diversity, along with other conservation groups, filed an emergency petition to require USFWS, the federal government,
entrusted with protecting and recovering rare, threatened and
endangered species, to fulfill their responsibilities and save the red
wolf from extinction in the wild. Red wolves,
once the darling of American endangered-species recovery innovations,
have been thrown under the bus by an agency cowed by pressure from
strident (although numerically small) anti-wolf and and anti-government
forces.

“Red wolves face the very real possibility of vanishing
from the wild if they don’t get the help they need,” said Brett Hartl,
endangered species policy director at the Center for Biological
Diversity. “Sadly the Fish and Wildlife Service seems more concerned
about appeasing a small minority of anti-wildlife extremists in North
Carolina than preventing the extinction of these wolves.”

What makes this federal betrayal of red wolves worse is that it flies
in the face of recommendations by its own scientists to actually
strengthen recovery efforts. The press release states, "Records
recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act demonstrate that
the Service’s red wolf biologists recommended strengthening protections
by eliminating loopholes in regulations that have facilitated excessive
illegal shootings of red wolves. As recently as 2013, the Service had
considered following these recommendations and had even drafted new
regulations. But the biologists’ recommendations were ignored, the
regulations were never finalized, and the red wolf continues to suffer
unsustainable levels of mortality." So the USFWS has dropped the ball
in violation of its own expert's advice and against the wishes of a
large majority of the public who strongly feel the survival of this shy
and elusive small canid is imperative.

The emergency petition requests that the US Fish and Wildlife Service
revise the current red wolf regulations in order to reduce red wolf
shooting deaths, establish additional wild populations of red wolves
(which will also boost sorely-needed genetic diversity), and,
importantly, reclassify all reintroduced populations of red wolves as
“essential” experimental populations. Currently, wild red wolves are
classified as “non-essential,” which severely limits the protections
they receive under the Endangered Species Act.
This one change should ensure that shot, trapped, poisoned or other
intentionally-killed wolves will be treated as crime victims and the
perpetrators held accountable to the full extent of the law.

“It is completely arbitrary that this lone wild population of red
wolves, which was reintroduced almost 30 years ago, is still classified
by the Service as a ‘non-essential’ species,” said Tara Zuardo, wildlife
attorney with the Animal Welfare Institute. “The Service has turned its
back on this species, and is undermining rather than bolstering red
wolf recovery.”

Red wolves are shy, inoffensive, even skittish, mainly hunting small
nuisance species like invasive nutria, rodents and plentiful rabbits.
These beautiful singers are family-oriented, elusive and deeply
beneficial to ecosystems they call home.

As revealed in a follow-up press release, the groups note they "may
pursue relief in federal court" if Fish and Wildlife does not respond
within 45 days. "Red wolves face the very real possibility of vanishing from the wild
if they don't get the help they need," said Brett Hartl, the Center for
Biological Diversity's endangered species policy director.

Organizations that filed today’s petition include the Animal Welfare
Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Endangered Species
Coalition, the South Florida Wildlands Association, WildEarth Guardians,
Wildlands Network, and the Wolf Conservation Center. Learn more about
red wolf conservation and the Center for Biological Diversity, here. To help the Center in its fight to save this uniquely American Southeastern wolf, donate to their Wolf Defense Fund here.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone